Vembu Attracts 900 Managed Storage Providers

More than 70 percent of successful managed service providers offer some form of managed storage, according to our MSPmentor 100 survey. Despite that lofty figure, the online storage market continues to enjoy strong growth.

One prime example: Vembu since February has attracted roughly 350 new online storage partners — pushing its worldwide customer base to more than 900 partners, according to Lakshmanan Narayan, president for Vembu.

Vembu’s StoreGrid for Service Providers allows MSPs to launch a remote back service for customers’ servers, desktops and laptops. Instead of hosting all the software and managing all the data on its own, Vembu’s business model calls for MSPs to deploy and manage StoreGrid within their own network operation centers.

So far, Vembu’s strategy seems to be working in multiple regions. Narayan estimates that 70 percent of Vembu’s partner base is in North America, followed by 11 percent in the United Kingdom and 9 percent for the rest of Europe. The remaining 10 percent of Vembu’s installed base is scattered across Australia and New Zealand (5 percent) and rest of world (5 percent).

Vembu’s momentum comes at a time of heightened competition for managed storage services. Just last week, Zenith Infotech mentioned that most of their software as a service (SaaS) business development efforts focus on backup and disaster recovery. And Symantec a few days ago claimed to be making progress with the Symantec Protection Network — a SaaS platform that currently offers online storage, with security options expected to debut late this year or in 2009. And other platform providers such as Asigra have successfully targeted the managed storage sector.

3 comments

I took a look at their site and it seems that they offer a solution to backup remotely to Amazon s3. Is anyone out there using this yet? If so can you offer some insight into how the product works? Does it require a server at each customer location or just an agent? Can you backup locally to each customer location?

Lane: The folks at Vembu are quite receptive to questions. I will ping them to make sure they know about your inquiry. Also, they will be at CompTIA Breakaway next week if any readers have more direct questions for Vembu.
-jp

On S3…
We don’t offer the ‘backup to S3’ facility yet – at least not for production environments. We do have an internal Beta of this wherein we’re running a backup server on Amazon EC2 and back-end storage at S3. This will be available as a public beta later this quarter.

For production environments – as a first step, we will be supporting a ‘replicate to S3′ feature whereby service providers can replicate their backup server(s) to S3. Thereafter, later this year, we will roll out the ability to run your backup server on EC2 (and other cloud computing platforms) and storage on S3 (and other cloud storage)

We don’t offer storage/ backup services ourselves; we only focus on the software. Each of our 900+ partners hosts and manages their customers’ data themselves – on a server(s) that they host/manage themselves – typically at a co-lo facility.

With the Amazon initiatives, besides offering choice to these partners, we will also be able to ‘speak to’ the many service providers who may prefer not to host their customers’ data themselves.

On typical deployments…
The typical deployment is one wherein laptops, desktops amp; servers (each of which is running an agent) backs up to the backup server.

Another common approach is for client machines to backup to local servers (so they can backup/restore a lot faster); the servers, in turn, replicate (on schedule) to a replication server managed by the service provider.

Many service providers employ both approaches. With the latter (local backup + replication), they, in effect, achieve what many backup appliances do – only they can do so with (say) StoreGrid running on a simple Linux machine – as a local backup server.

Lane, I’d be happy to run you through all this in more detail over a call/demo or perhaps at CompTIA Breakaway (booth 222), if you’re planning on being there. I can be reached at lux AT vembu DOT com

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